First thoughts on Chronica Feudalis

Just read through this book. It’s a great little game of the historical middle-age (12th century Europe). It has only a few pages of setting information, but those pages are pretty inspiring, and there are pointers to good reads for learning more for those who care about historical accuracy. On that note, one promising resource to use with the game is Columbia Games’ Lionheart. Lionheart is a rules-free RPG supplement that describes England in 1190AD.

My copy is on the way, but I believe it is done in the same style as their HarnWorld supplement, which is one of my favorite RPG products of all time, so that is very promising. It comes with a beautiful map that shows all the keeps and castles of the British isles. Also, the Chronica rules would be a great fit for a Harn game, for those who want some fantasy bits to spice things up! Tacking on a magic system and doing some monster stats is easy.

The game rules are very light. Characters have skills, of which there are only 24. A character’s rank in a skill is measured on a die scale: d4 being the lowest, d12 being the pinnacle of human achievement, and d20 being beyond human (e.g. the Dash skill of a horse). There are also tools and aspects, both also rated on the die scale. To succeed at something, you roll your skill die, plus possibly a tool die and an aspect die. You try to get over a target number with one of the dice. Sometimes multiple successes count.

Character generation is done by selecting three mentors. There are 17 mentor types, like Knight, Minstrel, and Monk, and you learn skills depending on the type of mentor. This is like a simplified lifepath system, such as Burning Wheel has.

The rules openly confess to combining ideas from Dogs in the Vineyard (the die scale, and dice for tools) and Spirit of the Century (aspects). In fact, aspects are by far the most important piece of the game. The interesting thing about Chronica is that it tries to do so much with this one mechanism. Aspects are used to represent all of the following:

• Goals
• Beliefs
• Instincts
• Skills (other than the 24 standard ones)
• Traits
• Physical injuries
• Mental injuries
• Temporary conditions (like “bound and gagged” or “confused”)
• Out-of-character player narration potential

There is no pre-defined list of aspects. Well, there is a list of examples (with no descriptions), but really you’re supposed to come up with your own, and make them colorful and inspiring. Because of the small number of skills and the lack of any other character elements that would differentiate characters, your aspects are the only thing that make your character unique.

Oh, and the environment can also have aspects, like Dark, Raining, On Fire, etc.

Mechanically, aspects are used to get bonus dice or penalty dice to rolls. A currency called Ardor points is spent to use an aspect in your favor, and awarded when an aspect works against you. This is just like Fate points in Spirit of the Century. A large part of conflict is to inflict new temporary aspects (conditions or injuries) on your opponent or on the environment, and using those to your advantage.

One interesting thing about this system is that injuries are aspects, and therefore, when an injury works against you, you earn an Ardor point. You can use this point to invoke aspects against the very NPC that inflicted the injury. So in some ways it’s good to be injured.

It seems like ardor points will be flying back and forth across the table during conflict (the book recommends using some sort of tokens for them). This is probably a good thing. The aspect system is intended to make conflict more descriptive. You narrate how an aspect would help or hinder a character.

Another interesting thing about the rules is that it describes four standard types of conflict: Combat, Parley, Chase, and Subterfuge. In fact, the skills are also grouped under these headings, with 6 skills under each. All conflict uses the same set of rules, which is neat.

One thing that I have some reservations against is how you basically get two chances to defend yourself against any kind of attack. You get a reaction, for example blocking with a sword, and then you get a “passive defense” roll, e.g. a Fitness roll against being hurt. It seems to me that this might prolong conflicts more than necessary. It is even more odd when you do non-combat conflicts. For example, in a Subterfuge situation, first the thieves  “attack” with Sneak, the guards react with Reflex, and if that fails the guards get a passive defense using Sense. Then it’s the guards’ turn. They attack with Hunt, the thieves react with Reflex, and if that fails the thieves get passive defense using Hide. Maybe it’s just me, but this seems a bit fiddly to me.

Since I have previously blogged about reward systems, I should mention that players always start a session with 3 points of Ardor. So these are short-term boosts, use them or lose them. The other reward mechanism is a fairly traditional skill improvement system, which of course is of a more permanent nature.

As for who sets the goals of the game (another issue that I have discussed previously), the game pretty much leaves it up to players to figure that out. The aspects do give players an individual plot-setting device, but there is no collective goal mechanic.

One more thing I love is the latin quotes spread around the book. For example, after mentioning that the stakes of conflicts must be followed once the conflict has been resolved: Pacta sunt servanda (agreeements must be kept; these are not translated in the book, but easy enough to find online for those of us who lack such classical training).

This became more of a general overview of the game than I had intended. From an RPG theory point of view, the really interesting thing is the “one mechanism to rule them all” aspect of aspects (as in the bulleted list above). Can this really work? Does it give enough “stuff” to make great adventures out of? Does it demand too much creativity of players, and would more hand-holding be better? Is is better to have several different sub-systems, one for goals, one for traits, one for injuries, and so forth?

I hope to play this game at some point and get back to you with my experiences of it.

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